LEGALISED THEFT ON EPIC SCALE BY BANKS

Manufacturing money and forcing people to borrow

Just a little thought I have to get off my chest. It keeps nagging away at me.

You’ll be noticing how house prices have been sinking like a stone recently as the banks hold onto all the money and refuse to lend it out to anyone – particularly for mortgages as well as businesses and even each other ?

Well then, you might also remember how everyone used to complain how house prices were becoming ever more ridiculously expensive as they climbed up from two or three times an annual salary to many, many times an annual salary.

The ordinary little flat I bought in Bristol in 1971 for three times my annual salary as a junior newspaper reporter was selling for fifteen times the current annual salary of exactly the same kind of job just over a year ago. The same thing happened all over the property market.

Why do you suppose there was this vast change in value ? Think about it carefully for a moment. In 1971 I had to work for just three years for my entire annual earnings to buy a home. A year ago, doing the same job, I would have to work for fifteen years for my complete annual earnings to buy the same home. As we all know, this grotesque distortion in house values caused lots and lots of problems as it progressively destabilised the whole housing market for all of us.

Now, within just a few weeks of the banks creating this Worldwide financial crisis, property prices in the UK and other parts of the World are plummeting as the supply of money everywhere withers and shrinks to almost nothing as the banks simply stop lending to anyone.

This is an extreme state of affairs. It is caused only by banks very suddenly refusing to lend any money because they are fearful the unstable economic circumstances they actually created will mean they won’t get their loans paid back because all the borrowers are busy going bust as a recession roars in from just over the visible horizon. This is the opposite of the banks previously conjuring up too much new money into existence and ramming it down people’s unwilling throats.

Thank you very much all you ‘Masters of the Universe’. Obviously you lot weren’t really as clever as you liked everyone else to think. Perhaps after all, you were just really greedy, rapacious conmen, disguising your dishonesty in a complete fiction of incomprehensible jargon and meaningless garbage which even most of you lot couldn’t understand – never mind the ordinary members of the public.

Now we are paying the price as people lose their jobs and their homes as thousands and thousands of people are catapulted by the banks into extreme poverty.

So what then, was the reason for all this distortion as house prices rose remorselessly to unrealistic, dizzying heights ?

Everyone complained about it but no one seemed to know why it was happening. People tried to think of why it might be happening. They blamed it on a ‘housing shortage’, on ‘too many immigrants coming into the country’, on ‘families disintegrating and more people living on their own as society broke apart at the seams in an orgy of self destruction’, and so on.

But the real reason was quite simply that banks were creating too much money and they had to lend it somewhere. They discovered one of the best and most profitable places to force loans down nearly everybody’s throat was by means of increasingly large mortgages as people were forced to compete with each to offer higher and higher prices for houses just because banks wanted to lend larger and larger sums of money – so they could make more money for themselves ! They quite simply ran out of places to lend money and dreamed up a whole new bottomless pit of possibility for more lending.

This meant that when anyone bought a house, they could only do it by making sure they offered more money than anyone else. The banks were always happy to keep on increasing the size of mortgages because they knew they had a complete stranglehold on each borrower.

It was one of the safest and most profitable ways of lending huge amounts of money over a long period of time. Much better, the banks thought, than all this tedious hard work of lending money to businesses over short periods of time. Businesses were much more risky and often went bust; then there was no one to pay loans back to the bank.

Individual householders were easier to pursue and were permanently chained to the banks until they either paid off their loans or died. A much better wheeze, thought the banks.

So, there we have it. Banks can create unlimited amounts of money if they can find somewhere to lend it. This is fine if the lending is sensibly organised and not rapacious and dishonest, or dangerously stupid because it wrecks economies and destroys people’s lives.

But the banks didn’t think of that. They were too immersed in their own greed to care less about what they were doing. As long as they could get away with it anything goes; that was fine by them.

Never mind the damage done to so many other people – or even whole nations. The whole country of Iceland has been made bankrupt and flung into instant poverty and even starvation by the nasty behaviour of the banks ! But the banks are OK, so that’s alright then ?

The ‘Masters of the Universe’ will just keep their heads down low for a bit until the recession blows over, then they will start again; effectively engaging once more in a form of legalised theft on an absolutely epic scale.

If bankers have the legal means of simply conjuring new money into existence, which they do, then there ought to be sensible law to control them and stop the gargantuan amounts of grasping dishonesty we have seen displayed by these dishonest little worms in Modern Times.